About Book

An explosive first novel - Madame Bovary in modern Germany - about a wife and mother whose failed love affairs have driven her to the edge of sanity and to a startling attempt at vindication. After being jilted by a rich boyfriend, Margaret, eighteen and heartbroken, throws herself into a comfortable but stifling marriage to Ernst, a war veteran with a penchant for routine and order, who still lives with his mother in a small German village.

It's not a bad life, considering Margaret's psychological scars, but neither Ernst's adoration nor the birth of a daughter can reawaken her frozen emotions. Until she slides into an affair with a married man with whom she plans to run away. Her plan is a fantasy that cannot possibly come true. Its repercussions nevertheless will explode with unimaginable force in these astonished lives.

About Elke Schmitter

Elke Schmitter was born in 1961 in Krefeld, Germany and studied philosophy in Munich. She worked as a journalist until 1994, when she became a full-time writer.